Come on, BART! Don’t delay public safety measures

Ben Friedland, a software engineer, created www.bartcrimes.com, which scrapes BART’s crime logs and publishes the information so passengers can easily check on the system’s reports.

Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle

Morning BART commuters know the drill.

As a train glides into a station, people in lines on the platform scan the train cars for a place to stand comfortably or, if they’re lucky to find it, a place to sit.

On Friday morning, Bryan Krahenbill saw what he thought were four open seats in a car on the train that entered North Concord/Martinez Station before 7:30 a.m.

He was excited to sit for the 27-minute ride to his job on College Avenue in Rockridge. But immediately after he entered the car, he saw — and smelled — why the seats were open.

There was a man sleeping on two of the seats, his tattered shirt and pants failing to cover his mostly naked body.

Krahenbill, 32, watched as riders getting on at other stations darted toward what they thought were open seats.

“There’s never seats in the morning,” he said. “Everyone would come by thinking there were seats and look at him and then walk away. It shows the state of the homeless crisis in the Bay Area. It’s horrible.”

Many homeless people appear to use BART for shelter and a warm place to sleep, and some transients seem to spend entire days riding BART’s 112-mile system, apparently because they have nowhere else to go.

That and the recent stabbings have BART riders like Krahenbill questioning the safety of the system.

Since the slaying of 18-year-old Nia Wilson on July 22, two BART riders have sustained serious but non-life-threatening stabbing injuries. The suspect in the latter attacks, a 27-year-old homeless man who fled the scene, was arrested four days later on a Richmond-bound train.

Smartphones are still getting frequently swiped on trains and station platforms, and people are being robbed of personal property inside BART’s parking structures, according to the agency’s daily police log.

There have been arrests for making threats against riders and station agents. There have been assaults with weapons. Just last week, two people were arrested two days apart for possession of a concealed dagger.

Ben Friedland, a BART passenger who built a user-friendly website so that other BART riders could easily check on the transit system’s crime reports, believes BART has become a safe space for robberies and violent crime because people know they can hop turnstiles for a free ride and get away at the next stop.

If BART “were able to completely eliminate fare evasion, this problem would drastically reduce,” he said. BART police are “constantly monitoring the parking lots, which I understand is necessary as well, but the real juicy stuff happens on the BART.”

BART is pushing to crack down harder on fare evaders, and it has proposed adding an eight-person fare inspection team. The thinking is that with more people focused solely on fare cheats, crime will drop.

Not every person who skips out on BART fare is dangerous, but we can’t ignore the fact that Nia Wilson was slain last month by a man who had received a fare-evasion citation just four days before Wilson’s death.

“Often those that commit serious crimes such as assaults are also known to commit minor crimes on our system like fare evasion,” BART Police Chief Carlos Rojas told The Chronicle on Thursday. “If you have disregard for the law, you are more likely to commit more serious crime.”

Right now, fare inspectors work only during the day. The second team would be dedicated to the evening shift. The additional inspectors would cost about $800,000 a year, BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost told me.

But the proposal was tabled until BART’s board could schedule an evening meeting in a suburban area, because suburban directors felt like they were hearing only from the urban riders who attended Thursday’s board meeting.

Chalk that up as another BART delay.

I asked Krahenbill if he feels safe on BART. He told me he no longer sleeps during his commute, because he feels he has to keep an eye out for potential trouble.

“You can’t put a cop on every train, unless they want to really pay for that,” he said. “But that would be the taxpayers paying for it.”

Otis R. Taylor Jr. is the East Bay columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, focusing on the people who make the region a fascinating place to live and work. A South Carolina transplant, Otis spent more than a decade at The (Columbia, S.C.) State newspaper, writing about arts, culture and entertainment. Previously, Otis was the managing editor of a tech startup. Otis is interested in reporting on issues relating to diversity and equality in the East Bay, as well as the region’s history, culture and politics. He studied English at Clemson University.